


How To Keep a Body for 6,000 Years

by kristophine



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, inna gotta davita baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26297890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kristophine/pseuds/kristophine
Summary: “It’s a bit odd, you know,” said Aziraphale contemplatively, staring down at his own hand.“Did you get into the freezer of those hippie friends of yours?* You know the brownies aren’t meant for you to eat.”
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	How To Keep a Body for 6,000 Years

“It’s a bit odd, you know,” said Aziraphale contemplatively, staring down at his own hand.

“Did you get into the freezer of those hippie friends of yours?* You _know_ the brownies aren’t meant for you to eat.”

“No, my dear, I meant this body.”

“It’s served you perfectly well so far.” Crowley was a touch wounded on the body’s behalf. After all, _he_ hadn’t had any problems with it.

“No, no, it’s not _that._ ” Aziraphale turned his hand over, peering now at the back of it, then at the palm. “It’s rather… I was discorporated, you know.”

“I was there. Well, not there. There shortly thereafter.”

“I’d never been, before.”

“Really!” Crowley swung his feet off the table and sat fully upright in surprise. “Not for six thousand years?”

“No. I managed to keep the body I’d been issued in rather recent condition, all things considered.”

“I’ll be,” said Crowley with some admiration. “I’ve been discorporated… must have been at least three times. Once by Ramses, nasty fellow, hated snakes, once by a Roman emperor—so much trouble with Rome!—and once in the fourteenth century.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was dreadfully inconvenient,” he added, a bit petulantly. “You have no _idea_ how much Hastur enjoys lording it over me when I come calling without a body.”

“Was it the Plague? I can’t imagine you with the Plague, somehow. Rats adore you.”**

“Nah, wasn’t the Plague.” Crowley coughed self-consciously. “Was a hrmahrm.”

“A what now? I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch that.”

“A _bear,_ angel. It got a bit peckish and it ate me.”

Aziraphale’s mouth twitched as he tried not to laugh, and Crowley attempted to cow him with a glare, but the laugh burst out after a few seconds anyway: merry and chiming.

“At any rate,” said Aziraphale once he had his hiccupping giggles back under control, “it’s _my_ first time and it’s been a bit strange. I suppose Adam just… created my body again, from the ether, as it were.”

“Well, it must have been from the ether. I didn’t see any other convenient materials about for constructing a human body.”

“I’ve been quite lucky, all things considered, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” Crowley let his head sag back against the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. “Lucky.”

*The “hippie friends” in question were scientists who had been at Woodstock and who had been dead for nearly twenty years; Crowley always had a vague sense that Aziraphale had other friends besides him, and would have been quite startled to discover that Aziraphale only averaged a new human acquaintance every couple of decades or so, a rate insufficient to sustain a constant presence of humans in his life.

**Rats _did_ adore Crowley, but it was beside the point. Dying of the Plague would have taken quite a bit of effort, since microbes, having no senses that would require bafflement, naturally tended to avoid occult/ethereal entities. However, Ligur had briefly taken to keeping a population of viruses as pets, and handing them out to humans on special occasions. He’d gotten huffy about the whole thing and stopped round about the time Pasteur’s work got big.

_Garden of Eden, approx. 6000BC_

“I do hope I did the right thing,” said the hapless wanker whose fluttering, anxious existence was _delighting_ Crawly to no end.

Crawly kept a civil tongue in his head* about the incident, since there didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by making a fuss over it. Besides, there might be something fun in all this later. It was delicious to watch an angel of the Lord stammer through an explanation of something that had to be all right. Didn’t it? It was to help the humans, and it was done from kindness and care, and that had to make it the right thing. Didn’t it?

On the other hand, Crawly had gotten caught up in what had seemed like rather a straightforward discussion to him, eons ago, and look how _that_ had gone. (For one thing, it had gotten him the nickname Crawly. That wasn’t meant fondly by the Forces of Hell. They weren’t budding herpetologists Down There.)

He ran into the angel a bit later in different territory. The transition from living in the magnificent Garden to living in the sprawling, inhospitable desert hadn’t gone well for Aziraphale. He was sweating—really! as if they needed to sweat! Well, perhaps it was sympathy sweating for the poor humans, who did look terrible.

Part of the reason they looked terrible was the pack of hyenas circling them. In the darkness of the sweltering night Crawly could see perfectly well what was happening, probably better than either of the human participants. It wasn’t that the humans _were_ carrion, yet, but they weren’t so far from it as to totally dissuade the hyenas, and Crawly surprised himself with a moment’s pang: he’d rather enjoyed the humans; it was going to be a shame to see them fizzle out when they’d had the potential to burn so brightly.

If God had meant for them to perish when She sent them out of the Garden, though, there wasn’t much to be done about it.

Unless one took one’s job as doing whatever She wouldn’t approve of.

In that case…

The flaming sword was, as per its usual, on fire, but the humans had gotten too far from it. The hyenas were between them and their only weapon. (They hadn’t gotten around to inventing slings yet, more’s the pity.) And Aziraphale, curse his heart, seemed to have gotten the memo at just about the same time as Crawly, or perhaps he’d been assigned the task of keeping an eye on them, too.

Aziraphale was staring at the hyenas from the other side of things, next to the humans, although they didn’t seem to realize that he was there. He was very obviously thinking about doing something idiotic. It was written all over his face, in possibly phosphorescent script, _Thinking About Doing Something Idiotic,_ and Crawly had a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

It would only be discorporation. If the humans died, now, while there were still just the two of them, he probably wouldn’t even need a new body. Bodies were peculiar, anyway, newfangled inventions, not one of God’s best to be honest—Crawly still liked the celestial spheres most of all, the soft way they chimed against each other if you listened hard enough in a still, black, inky night.

And if the humans died now, he wouldn’t get to come up to Earth, would he. He wouldn’t get to pop up here and have a nice listen to the harmonies of the spheres. He’d be stuck Below, where Beelzebub was just getting the hang of making clouds of flies billow into your open mouth if you tried to interrupt them.

“Oh, sod it,” Crawly muttered to himself, and just as a hyena launched itself at Aziraphale, he summoned a great burst of lightning from the sky and fried it.

He wasn’t entirely prepared for how enthusiastically Aziraphale took to barbecue.

* _Whose_ didn’t matter.


End file.
